Yesterday as Israel launched a ground invasion of #Gaza, he sent a letter to IDF soldiers invoking 10/7 & repeating "Remember what Amalek did to you" & "This is a war between the children of light & the children of darkness."
Biblical verses re Amalek "are among its most violent—& have a long history of being used by Jews on the far right to justify killing Palestinians.
God commands King Saul...to kill every person in Amalek"
“This is what the Lord Almighty says,” the prophet Samuel tells Saul. “‘I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt.
Now go, attack the Amalekites & totally destroy all that belongs to them.
Do not spare them; put to death men & women, children & infants, cattle & sheep, camels & donkeys.’”
"Hundreds of years later, Saul nearly fulfills the command by killing all Amalekite men, women, & children. But he spares their king, who keeps his people barely alive by having a child. Many more generations later, one of his descendants, the villain Haman, goes on to develop a plot to kill all the Jews living in exile under a Persian ruler. The lesson, when read literally, is clear: Saul’s failure to kill every Amalekite posed an existential threat to the Jewish people."
The soldiers will know the story of the Amalek ambush & God's decree to eliminate Amalek because it is traditionally read on the Shabbat service before Purim.
Further, "it remains common for Israeli extremists to view Palestinians as modern-day Amalekites.
In 1980, the Rabbi Israel Hess wrote an article that used the story of Amalek to justify wiping out Palestinians.
Its title has been translated as “Genocide: A Commandment of the Torah,” as well as “The Mitzvah of Genocide in the Torah.”"
"The Brooklyn-born extremist Baruch Goldstein also saw Palestine as Amalek. In 1994, he slaughtered 29 Muslims praying at a mosque in Hebron, a city in the occupied West Bank that is sacred to Jews & Muslims. Goldstein carried out the massacre on Purim, one week after he would have heard the biblical retelling of the command to wipe out a rival nation. As the journalist Peter Beinart and others have written, the timing was not a coincidence."
The mass murderer "Goldstein’s grave has become a pilgrimage site for the Israeli far right"
His "admirers have included Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s current minister of national security. For Purim, a holiday on which Jews sometimes wear costumes, Ben-Gvir dressed as Goldstein on multiple occasions in his youth. He kept a picture of Goldstein in his living room until 2020. He has an extensive criminal record that includes convictions for supporting a terrorist organization & inciting racism"
[Ben-Gvir is a fascist, convicted of supporting a Jewish terrorist group. He is the National Security Minister of Israel.
He & Finance Minister Smotrich (under suspicion for plotting terrorism) are both disciples of convicted RW terrorist Rabbi Meir Kahane, whose Kakh movement "openly advocated for ethnic cleansing [in] Palestine [&] beyond". After the 1994 mosque massacre by Goldstein, it was labeled a terrorist org by US State Dept & Israel.
"Ben Gvir, still an avid Kahane supporter...was convicted [in 2007] for supporting a terrorist organisation and inciting racism in the streets of Jerusalem. He has since been involved in various violent incidents including in 2021 where he pulled out a gun on a Palestinian parking attendant in Tel Aviv."
"Shanes said that it was “incredibly dangerous & irresponsible & deliberate” for Netanyahu to invoke Amalek, given the ongoing war & [how it] is understood by the far right. He added that calling the enemy Amalek will make it more difficult for people who try to defend the position that Israel is not “involved in a crime against humanity or a genocidal act.”
"Beinart, an Orthodox Jew who previously edited the New Republic...expressed similar concern. “The wisdom of rabbinic tradition was to declare that we no longer know who Amalek is because that restrains the genocidal plain meaning of the Biblical text...in claiming that he knows who Amalek is, [Netanyahu] is undoing the moral scaffolding created by Jewish tradition & asserting a Biblical literalism that...given the military power at his disposal, is frankly terrifying.”
Jacobs says that "while Hamas & Israel have committed war crimes, Israel’s actions do not meet the international standard of genocide. “It’s not a term that should be thrown around casually at all,” she explained, particularly against a people that have experienced genocide. Instead, Jacobs sees Netanyahu, who she described as “totally right-wing & incompetent,” referring to Amalek as yet another case of him “being irresponsible & inciting.”
"Alan Dershowitz told me...he supported Netanyahu “100%” to the extent that [he] was equating Hamas with Amalek"
"When I mentioned the command to kill Amalekite women & children, Dershowitz responded, “There are other parts of the Bible that say the opposite..."
Netanyahu did not cite those parts."
Shanes was not convinced: Amalek is a nation. “If someone says, ‘I just mean...Hamas…,’ that’s not the effect it has in the body politic. The effect it has is, We have to wipe these people out.”
Thursday "a group of [UN] experts said that Palestinians are at “grave risk of genocide”
Friday "Netanyahu invoked verses "that the [Israeli] far right has long used as a justification for genocide during a war in which some argue Israel is committing genocide"
"Rabbi Jill Jacobs—the head of T’ruah, a rabbinical human rights organziation—said that rabbis generally agree that Amalek no longer exists, & that references to it do not provide a morally acceptable justification for attacking anyone"
“Israel's National Security Minister, Itamar #BenGvir, further escalated the situation on Monday night by publicly inciting against Ahsan Kanaan, a judge at the Haifa Magistrates' Court, for his decision to release a left-wing Jewish-Israeli activist from detention. "This is what #InternalEnemies look like,” Ben Gvir wrote on…Twitter…Within hours, the post had been widely disseminated … & right-wing activists began searching for the judge’s address. Some even called to confront him physically.”
"Israel's far-right National Security Minister Itamar #BenGvir said in a radio interview Sunday that’s what’s needed in #Gaza is “full control” & an “occupation,” & that after winning the war against Hamas, as “the landlord” Israelis should re-establish settlements in the Gaza Strip evacuated in 2005. Avi Dichter, a member of the security cabinet, told an interviewer Saturday that Israel was “now rolling out the Gaza Nakba.”
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